


Tails

by lesbomancy



Category: Shadowrun
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 13:27:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13705410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbomancy/pseuds/lesbomancy
Summary: A write-up of the B-team's efforts during the finale to my first Shadowrun arc!





	Tails

Dio loudly beat his hands on the steering wheel, the 30 year-old bus groaning and squealing as it turned along a highly patrolled and regulated street. A driver that wasn’t letting the car do the actual driving in these parts was breaking five or six laws. Yet somehow Dio managed to get a license that allowed him to do just that.

Sitting behind him, Digits was inspecting his license. Her thumbnail flicked something old and dry off the laminate, her brows raising.

“Jesus H. Cheetos, big boy. There somethin’ in the Sixth World you ain’t allowed to drive?”

He half-turned, turning the ear without a headphone over it towards whomever addressed him. He hadn’t learned names just yet. The people were nice, they were great, but they all had names and he wasn’t good with that.

“I can’t fly!” Dio shouted with barely contained glee.

“Most people can’t. Splat right when they hit the pavement.”

“Aaahah! Is joke! I mean that I cannot fly machines that fly! No pilot. Boat, truck, cranes, car, bike, scooooooter… I drive them all! Except plane or helicopter. Instructor said I fly too low. Would not let me get license.”

“Well there ya fuckin’ go, then. Can’t drive a car low, can ya?”

“Actually-...!”

Dio began prattling on, talking about something that was no doubt important to him. Digits turned around to inspect her commlink, it was buzzing. Unknown number, which probably meant Johnny.

“5 mins.”

She turned back and slapped her hand on Dio’s shoulder, gesturing to the curb through the driver’s-side window.

“Oi, lemme off here. I gotta see a man about a Bee Em Doubbya.”

As the bus screeched to a halt and the door open, Digits stole a glance down at the seats, light barely piercing the armored slats over the windows of the bus. Being Downtown, the thought probably was that this was for some trashy action trideo or something. With a genuine yawn (binge watching would be the death of her) she hopped down to the pavement, the honking of a car’s horn jostling her. In proper Galway fashion she picked up a rock and threw it at the car, holding her fingers up in a lewd gesture to the passing vehicle. The bus roared to life and continued on and Digits could see the casino less than a block down, though construction vehicles had blocked most of what was going to be the casino’s parking lot and mini golf course. Remembering the surveillance state that the world had become, she quickly pulled a pair of glasses out of her pocket and slid them on, the reflective material they were made out of blinding nearby security cameras.

Satisfied, she walked into the nearest Starbucks with a window that let her see the going-on of the casino assault. Her barista was a pimple-faced tosser named Herbert and he spelled “Digits” with a J. She had to physically remove herself from the counter to avoid breaking the human boy’s nose.

In what world does a J and a G make the same noise? At least Americans were polite because they didn’t have intelligence going for them.

Settling down into the last remaining plush chair that gave her a decent viewpoint she sat down, sipped her latte, and waited.

 

\------------------------------------------

 

The troll-sized indentation in the steering column had the horn stuck down. Dio thought it was really funny, especially the warbling noise it made as he pounded the bus through six chain link fences and around traffic pylons that would’ve stopped them in their tracks. The man in the guardhouse looked about ready to shit his pants, fleeing away from it just moments before the bus collapsed it against the grill, a million pieces of cheap particle wood and electronics scattered in the air for a split second.

“LAST STOOOOOOOOP!”

Dio swerved the bus, nearly sending it over onto its side, setting it up like a barrier between the front of the casino and their escape path. Immediately, gunfire from the black-clothed mercenaries began to ping and plink against the armored slats, the bulletproof glass occasionally thudding and snapping but ultimately standing against the hail of fire.

He picked up two shotguns, sliding the sawn-off into a holster over his chest that he didn’t like because it chafed his nipples. The other shotgun, his favorite, had tube magazines and several of those were sitting in a rig near the small of his pack. He had a LOT of ammo to go through and the construction site had a lot of debris. Before disembarking, he remembered he wasn’t in charge! He was going to go all John McClaine again if he wasn’t careful about it. Making sure he had his work boots on he let out a sigh of relief, not seeing Mirage’s hand come up to pull him down by his rig.

“I say ‘CAN YOU HEAR ME?’”

Dio pulled the earbuds out of his ears. THAT is what he forgot! Just like Baby Driver…

Mirage made hand gestures in front of Dio’s face. He didn’t know sign language, voiced that he didn’t, and Mirage looked visibly fed-up with the big idiot.

“Flank right! Draw fire from there, then I will push up center with the drone. Xi and Bai will go left and open fire when they turn to you. It will be a good killzone, yes?”

“Yes, boss!”

He loved the Killzone series. These guys kinda looked like Helghast, too. He jumped out the doorway and onto the dirt, holding his head low and charging for the construction equipment that would keep his movements obscured. No one was there but it was really inconvenient for a troll to get between all these tight spaces. He hoped the others had more room to move around.

He peeked around the corner, snapping behind cover quickly. Many gentlemen and ladies, all of them in super sleek black clothing with purple berets. Some drones, too! Crazy. Maybe Johnny would get drones sometime for him if he was really good. Though cyberware looked icky, like a commlink jack in your brain. Bad idea, he thought, so guns he’d stay with. Suddenly remembering he was supposed to be offering his friends covering fire, he quickly flipped his shotgun around, cycling the action just enough to see if the magazine was feeding properly.

It was.

Dio slapped his armored vest and jumped out from cover. The little glowing green nobs on his sights lined up with each closest target, firing five slugs before they were able to react and return fire. As he jumped back behind cover he saw one of the mercenaries on the floor, not moving, with lots of blood around his neck. Though the amount of gunfire hitting the equipment he was hiding behind was so constant that he had thought to make a run for it.

No. Wait for the little anarchist. Follow the plan. Don’t be Jack Reacher.

 

\------------------------------------------

 

Huddled behind a bus in some rich-ass part of Seattle is exactly Guo didn’t want to spend his weekend. He liked being a bodyguard for Johnny. The dude was a homebody. He barely, if ever, really went anywhere dangerous. Occasionally he’d put on a fake mustache, sunglasses and a stupid hat because it was fun to fuck with people but compared to the work Guo did in the last ten years, Johnny might as well have been a little old lady with how he liked to stay home and enjoy a cup of tea.

The dwarf woman next to him grabbed his arm, pulling him forward. He had zoned out. Because how could you not when you’re about to fucking die.

“Guo! What the fuck, get in the game!” Xi shouted at him in Cantonese, only her eyes visible from underneath her bangs and over the tight scarf that covered her nose and mouth. They were mostly strangers to each other despite being Johnny’s bodyguards for almost half a decade, and Xi never really spoke to anyone. He knew she didn’t speak English, but that was about it. He didn’t really care, that was her choice, and speaking in Cantonese was easier for Guo so on a job like this they’d pretty much be guaranteed to be together.

“Yeah, well, if Dio wasn’t so slow we’d be pushing by now,” Guo complained.

Xi rolled her eyes, “Check weapons, if I’m right he’s about to open fire.”

Guo obliged, figuring it was about time. The machete on his back was… well, it was a thing. Sharp as ever and more like a cleaver than anything else. His pride and joys were the twin Browning Ultra Power pistols in his hands. Extended magazine, reflex sights with a good sight picture and a crisp trigger pull thanks to a modded hair trigger that Johnny got for Guo’s birthday this last year.

Plus it had two pretty ladies in cheongsam on the handles, the red really looking good against the faux-ivory handle itself. 

Xi herself was a funky girl. Physical adept. He didn’t really get the skill set. Magic and fists. It seemed a lot like eggs and chocolate to him, though he couldn’t argue with the results. After popping a fresh magazine into each of his pistols he jerked when the sound of Dio and his obscenely loud shotgun cracked through the air like a whip.

He waited until Xi was running since she was slower thanks to her little dwarf legs. But that just meant she was a smaller profile and he was a dumbass for not going as fast as he could. This was evident by one of the drones spooling up its gun and firing at Guo until it hit him in the leg. It hurt like hell but he’d been shot too many times to let that stop him from leaping behind cover. He cursed lowly, tilting his leg to see the damage, his fingers coming away wet. It felt like it went straight through and the blood loss wasn’t terrible. He could live with that.

Getting to his feet, he looked around to find Xi. She was already half-way towards the backs of the mercenaries firing at Dio, the drone that had hit Guo turning to shoot at her. Guo jumped up, aiming and attempting to gun down the drone first but the automated weapons were too fast and Guo fumbled with the safeties thanks to his blood-stained fingers.

His jaw dropped as the crackle of fire went for Xi… and then she did a cartwheel, jumped into the air, landed on a mercenary and snapped his neck with her cyberlegs. When she jumped down to the ground she used the armored torso of the now-deceased man to absorb the machine gun fire while Guo took another aim with both pistols and let off a small volley, aiming and firing in a patterned, practiced manner.

The Rigger controlling the drone appeared from behind a stack of lumber, the blue tarp over it almost obscuring them but Guo was a quick shot - and better - so all that Rigger got was a torso full of lead until he fell back and didn’t get up. Xi was making quick work of the ones firing at Dio, her fist literally causing one mercenary’s head to go concave, bone and matter flying into the air around her spell-infused blow like a firecracker inside a watermelon.

She retreated quickly, hiding behind cover as the mercenaries turned to face her and more poured out from the lobby, pointing and advancing with the efficiency of real soldiers. They fired on Xi and Guo immediately, Guo able to return fire and get a lucky shot off on one of them before the incoming supersonic snaps of aggressive negotiation forced him behind the metal crate.

 

\------------------------------------------

 

“Robot. When reinforcements come, you will run gun to bulldozer.”

“I have a name, ma’am.”

“What? What name?”

“Threepeio.”

“Peepo?”

“Just call me Three, ma’am.”

“Drei, then. Sounds better.”

“That’s actually not bad. So you want me to run into a hail of gunfire and die… unless there was more to this plan?” 3PO tilted his head, looking underneath the bus briefly. He couldn’t see shit.

“Listen, Dove likes peace. So we are going to take the quickest path to peace. Force surrender or eradicate.”

“Huh. You kind of have that sexy German dominatrix thing going on now. No black leather?”

“Too squeaky. You run to bulldozer, get it started. Raise scooper-...”

“Scooper.”

“I don’t know what it is called,” Mirage said in frustration.

“Neither do I. But I’m pretty confident it isn’t ‘scooper.’”

“Stop interrupting.”

“Sure thing, ma’am.”

The sound of Dio’s shotgun cracked through the air.

“You raise scooper. Gives me chance to jump on. You drive bulldozer to the stairs. We have high cover, they are coming from level terrain. It makes up disadvantage. They will be distracted while Dio and Chinese hit from both sides.”

She held up a single-shot grenade launcher.

“Then I use Nuremberg.”

“You named your grenade launcher.”

“Yes.”

“Nuremberg?”

“... yes?” She said angrily, loading a shell into it and snapping it closed.

“Well, that just says a lot about you and I’m a virtual intelligence and not a psychiatrist so let’s get this plan moving, ma’am.”

“You talk too much.”

“I’ve been told that, ma’am.”

Guo’s pistols rang out, and his cry of pain as he was shot was loud enough for them to hear from behind the bus. Mirage punched 3PO in the shoulder.

“Go!”

He didn’t have to be told twice. Barely armored, mostly prototype and garbage crash test dummy parts made up the majority of his body and, honestly, he had little faith in them most of the time. But Johnny offered to buy him new pieces if he worked this job. He probably would’ve done it anyway. That funky kid named Jester saved him from a scrap heap, though he didn’t know why he was named Jester. Five minutes on the Matrix boards and he was able to determine that most of the time Jesters had silly hats. All the Elf kid had were a fancy pair of fashionable goggles.

The weirdness of metahumanity was processed just as fast as the best path to the bulldozer was, with 3PO jogging around and over cover like an Olympian. Fatigue was nonexistent and in a few moments he had pulled the door of the bulldozer open, turned it on and raised the bucket.

He watched as the Rigger was shot several times and again as others died. He didn’t have a stomach but he’s pretty sure it would’ve sank, seeing the death before him. Could androids dream of electric nausea? Aaah, he wished he had someone to tell that one to. That one was good.

Mirage jumped onto the front of the bulldozer, throwing her body against the arm of the bucket. She was in a semi-prone position as her grenade launcher was aimed and she let out a shot at the incoming reinforcements.

Bloomph!

Black smoke and fire shot up from the lobby area as Mirage’s shot was on the mark. She turned around, one foot pressed against the engine and jerked her hand at 3PO. He assumed it meant ‘forward,’ so he took the bulldozer forward. It jerked from the acceleration and slowly plodded over debris and other equipment like a tank. Mirage loaded another round, fired, and then pulled the sling around her shoulder. He could almost hear the click as she brought the safety off of her UZI and she patiently waited behind the bucket until the bulldozer was over the bend… and right in front of the lobby.

Mirage stood up and fired off all 36 rounds without pausing, the glass shattering loudly and several mercenaries going down. Following her lead, Dio turned the corner and began firing, as did Guo and even Xi, the latter armed with an Ares Alpha from one of the fallen mercenaries.

They kept coming, through. For nearly an hour they kept coming. The team made a little headway into the lobby before 3PO turned around to see lights in the distance. His optical camera zoomed in and he saw that they were two Knight Errant gunships… and three VTOL troop transports.

3PO pushed the door to the bulldozer open.

“Hey guys, if we don’t leave then we’re probably going to die!”

 

\------------------------------------------

 

Digits sat up straight as she saw the choppers heading their way to the casino, red wing lights blinking in the Seattle skyline like little enthusiastic seagulls at a rave. Her mouth almost dropped as the LONE*STAR vehicles started racing through the seat and her stomach sank when three armored personnel carriers came in after them. Everything had been so distant until this point, so far away, that it seemed like another job.

She dipped the car keys she had into her coffee, plucked them out with a napkin and dumped them into a trash can before standing before Herbert. Time to build an alibi.

“‘Ey, Herby, d’you have troll-sized portions for your soup and sandwiches?”

 

\------------------------------------------

 

Johnny cursed, tires squealing as he brought the van around. He hit the breaks immediately as he came face-to-face with a LONE*STAR cruiser. The officers inside looked horrified, almost as scared as Johnny was. Johnny smiled, put his hand outside the driver’s side window and fired his Glock until the magazine was dry, the fully automatic spray obscuring their vision by peppering bullets into the bulletproof glass.

Picking up the commlink, he screamed into it.

“Pixie! Get the fuck out of there right now! Pixie! You got Knights and Lone Star! GET OUT!”

He was half-panicking as he was thrown into a thirty-five minute chase with various LONE*STAR cruisers, using parking garages, tunnels, and every trick in the book until he threw them off of him. It was a tense, white-knuckle affair and Johnny had almost passed out from the sheer exhaustion of it by the time he got back to the safehouse but once he did manage to drop the tail he stopped in an alleyway, tore off the fake plates to the van, got back in and drove out the other side of the alley ten minutes later. He stopped before a Chinese restaurant a few blocks from the safehouse, brow sticky with sweat and his stomach churning at what just happened. They weren’t within earshot of pedestrians. They weren’t near any security offices, Dom wouldn’t have called the cops… or would he have?

The light was green for a while before he pulled into the strip mall with the Chinese restaurant. He put it into park, cursed, and pounded the console until his knuckles were red. Taking a deep breath, he finally got up the courage to head home. Face his daughter. See who else survived.

He turned the engine on, tossing his burner commlink and PDA out the window after wiping them down with a cloth.

 

\------------------------------------------

 

Guo held his arm, blood gushing from the wound. The Knight Errant’s knife was still stuck inside, a heated serrated blade that kept him in intense pain. Xi held him down with one hand, preventing him from hurting himself as the bus roared through the Downtown streets.

3PO held his dismembered leg in his hand, otherwise immobile. A perfect passenger. He did keep twitching and humming the Dora the Explorer theme. That did nothing for morale.

Mirage had a good portion of herself covered in smoke, soot, and blood. Whatever happened when she was pulled into that APC was not something to ask about, with her snarling and snapping and German words not proper to repeat. When the four officers apprehended her, Dio was really surprised to only see her come out after the APC jerked up into the air like a grenade went off inside. But the driver came out, too. Sort of. His torso came out the windshield, though his legs stayed behind. Mirage passed out the moment she had sat down in the bus, the wound in her chest bloody and gruesome. But she’d live. At least that’s what Dio hoped.

He was crying as the bus popped the curb, knowing full-well that he couldn’t outrun these tails. He had to outsmart them. And he was really, really stupid. He wanted to close his eyes and remember what Johnny told him about getaway driving with cops.

But if he closed his eyes then they’d all die, probably. The bus jostled with every attempt by police to send the bus onto its side and eventually Dio just got lucky. An intersection, an oncoming traffic jam and Dio’s own skill as a driver. He looked down and saw an approaching car, judging its speed and he gunned it.

Dio passed through the red light as the automated path of the other car slammed it into the side of the police cruiser behind him. That cruiser’s rear-end crumpled as the lone line of cruisers, APCs, and pursuit vehicles ended up in a massive pile-up.

He then jerked the wheel, sending the bus heading towards the Barrens. A free zone, he hoped, but for the next four hours he was driving to avoid police before finally arriving at the safehouse.

It took him two trips to get everyone into the safehouse, then he was on the road and he dropped the bus at a local chop shop. He waited and watched for all the ten minutes it took for the bus to be reduced to a frame and an engine, everything else being loaded into trucks and sent off to different shops across the city. His eyes closed as he was waiting in the uncomfortable plastic bucket seat meant for humans, elves and dwarves. His asscheeks were practically big enough for a seat each.

Nobody dared wake the snoring troll in the waiting room until the task was done.


End file.
